lost learning
an essay from 2000 when I was 30 years old
Recently I got lost.
This is unusual because I never get lost. Ever. Anywhere. Not that I have felt completely immune to getting lost. The feelings I had while stopping by the side of the Sturt Highway were as aware of my mortality as anything. They were similar to those felt standing on the edge of a cliff. One could wander out amongst the mulga and just disappear, as easily as stepping off into thin air. There was an attraction in the fear.
As a child growing up in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney in New South Wales, I spent a lot of time in the gullies with my friends and family wandering around for miles. As an 8 year old I was nearly the oldest. We never got lost. And we walked for miles and miles through the bush, or so it seemed, down gullies, into sandstone caves. Our parents only worried when we came back in the rain and I would be ritually chided for ignoring my bronchitis.
I don’t get lost. I had no idea what it feels like. The bush is my place.
I would like to say that I intended to get lost as part of my learning project, hopefully with a crowd of others to make the experience as social learning experience, but it just sort of happened.
I would also like to say that I did not intend to get lost, but I suspect it was a half conscious thing. Part of me wondered what it was like to get lost, another part was thinking, “Let’s see you get out of this!” Probably the autopilot I acquired as a child in the Blue Mountains. Possibly it was feeling a little taken for granted.
I don’t get lost. No.
However, on the ground, it has provided me with a vital insight into the metaphor ‘movement over landscape’.
When and Weather
My partner Mona Loofs is currently doing a PhD in Ecology at the University of Tasmania, Geography and Environmental Studies Department. Part of her work involves an experiment on the effects of fire-fighting foam on heathland vegetation in co-operation with the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. The site of these sixty quadrats is at Boulder Point in the Mt William National Park in North Eastern Tasmania where an old pastoral coast road has been gated and now forms a part of a walking circuit and more importantly a fire trail. It splits the sixty quadrats (which I have GPSed) into the burnt plots and the unburnt controls. It was integrated into a 10 000 hectare environmental management fire by Parks.
Months later while Mona has her CFS induced siesta in the back of the car, I walk off for a bit of an explore, as I often do, a couple of hours or less. I am usually on autopilot and do a short loop away and aback to the road. The beach is ten minutes away. There are important midden sites here and there, shell-scatter and stone artefacts everywhere. Inland from the road the low coastal heath gives way to a mosaic of plant communities, scrubby heath, heathy woodlands, wooded knolls, intermittent wetlands, and tea-tree boggy bits. All further fractalled by the patchy but recent burn.
One day I decided to wander further in, past that stand of trees. When I wander I am intensely interested in the ground and features beneath my feet and immediately about me. This sedgeland, this hollow log, this enlichened rock, this grasstree, this burnt area, this moss. And I leave the landmark and sky navigation to the autopilot, it has become an intuitive automation. Conscious involvement is not a priority, though not forgotten.
And as usual I did not carry a compass or map or GPS. Or even a watch.
However, it was an overcast day, there was no sun, there was no shadow at all. And there were no landmarks available to the autopilot either as the mosaic of plant communities was impossible to predict. There were no paths. No larger landmarks were visible because of the ridges of tall trees in some communities. Unlike most of Tasmania the terrain of the far north east is comparatively flat and featureless.
So I lost track and my loop back to the road had become a circle in the scrub.
An hour into enjoying my wander, suspicions began to form, but in my over-confidence, I held them at bay, it was not that I did not hear the warning, merely that I was completely absorbed in the ground at my feet the beauty of the life around me. The landscape was a complex interlocking of plant communities and there differing ambience, particularly on this overcast day was fascinating. After wandering with these suspicions held at bay for half an hour I realised that I had not just broken out into an area I recognised like I usually did. Everything still looked different. And again different. New.
A little perturbed but still unconcerned with danger to my self I climbed a tree to get a good view. I was on a rise that had been burnt clear. The control burn had not been very hot and the treetops were still green, with the epidermal growths restricted to the lower trunks. In finding a clear line of site to Mt William, a low hill, I broke a few branches and thought well that is easy enough. Looking north over a creek’s drainage area, I could see the sea misted sandy point of Cape Naturaliste. It was not a hot day. It was not a cold day. A perfect day for walking.
A little later while still on the burnt granite rise I climbed another tree and yes there was Mt William. I wandered a little from granite boulder to granite boulder among the burnt stalks of Leptospermum scoparia and then decided to climb another tree. Of course, as I looked up I could see the green twigs I had broken when I first climbed a tree. It was now that I knew I was lost and the autopilot laughed.
Now everything look different. Except the tree which looked the same now. It was the only thing I recognised which was its difference I suppose. So this is what lost is, I thought, still a little smugly. At least I had my distant landmarks. Lost as I was, I was not completely lost. I had several hours of light, overcast and windless as the day was. Though I had been walking for an hour, an hour and a half, I was still only half an hour from the car. Probably just a kilometre or so away. Through dense partly burnt scrub.
Now I knew what scrub was and how it differed from my bush of plant community mosaics of heath sedgelands and intermittent wetlands. I was in scrub.
I decided to head along a line drawn to the distant sandy coastline well to the north. I also decided to keep climbing trees. But this time decided to pick the next tree from the tree I was in, after making a line of sight with the distant sand. This line would make no allowances for pretty grasstrees, nor obstacles like thickets of melaleuca and coral fern. The line of flight was all.
This was fine in theory, but in practice the line of sight with the distant sand disappeared by the time I had climbed the second tree. Mt William was constant, but in such an unvarying way, as my earlier attempts to keep it at my back had shown, that as a landmark in this undulating scrubby countryside it was not good for my present predicament. I had to go back to my autopilot and get it to maintain a line to the distant sand in an imaginary way and keep it present to mind as I moved and composed myself again. A virtual compass.
After some five trees or so and anywhere between 20-45 minutes I broke out, or rather broke in to country I knew. The boulders on the hill that made up Boulder Point were ahead of me, if from a refreshing angle. The track on which the car would be sitting with Mona still asleep within, around the corner, was between me and the red granit (see map).
I fell forward into the reeds that covered the large open half burnt ‘intermittent wetland’ and rested after a deep sigh.
Very slowly I walk back to the car. Mona still sleepy noticed something was odd as I looked rather wild, badhaired and my cotton clothes covered in the charcoal drawings a fired scrub leaves. While Mona worked, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the comforting structure of the car’s front seat.
Later when I studied the map in order to backtrack my movements I found I has selected the quickest and surest way out, hard as it was. Certainly I was surprised at how quickly I got unlost. Or rather the long time lost suddenly collapse as I found myself in place.
Found Learning
That is the bare bones of the event. In reflection I have come to notice and realise several different things about the entire process.
The first is that the energy I found within to get unlost was not an intellectual frame of reference, nor a socially imbued construct (they are only good for shelter anyway) nor some special talent at tapping unknown reserves. But was the very emotional core of the animal of me. That which moves. Or in another word, panic. This energy moved me and got me from tree to tree. Got me up and down the trees. Got me back to the road.
In the same turning within I found that the person I was became disjointed, detached, or floating, though very concerned with everything. This person thought up the tree climbing scenario, decided on a line of flight, organised the autopilot again, and recognised the rocks ahead, and knew where the road was. I was disaffected by the sudden change of landscape into terrain.
Having never been lost before, beyond a momentary disorientation, I have never been in this ‘place’ before. When one is momentarily disorientated, one’s frame of reference is slightly askew from one’s expected perceptions. Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? It is overcoming by re-jigging or tweaking one or other of the aspects of their view that one regains one’s composure. Rarely is there a need to move.
Being lost means being stripped of a landscape. There is only a terrain. Your movements fail to create a landscape out of that terrain. Your composure is gone. Confidence has failed you. Your body is unfounded. Its movements fail. It becomes possible that as the landscape has gone soon the body will follow. Unless you can regain the landscape. The panic is not the claustrophobic frenzy, for you do not what out, or agoraphobia where you want in, it is not a line of flight from, or to, in escape but it is related to both. The panic exists in place of your composure. The composure has failed, the landscape is gone, but the body is still here and the animal is not dead, yet.
In instructions to the lost or the broken down, emergency services often say things like, stay where you are, or stay with the vehicle. This helps rescuers track your (non) movements and also allows them more time to find you as you have not wasted energy in a blind panic flailing around uselessly in the scrub. Panic is the last fling and brings you near to the edge of your life.
However if you can ride that panic, not let it rule you, but not deny it, and re-compose yourself within that energy, using it to move, give it style, so that by re-composing your body you compose a landscape again from the terrain. For the re-composing embodies a style that allows you to bridge to the landscape you left behind. That gives your movement bias in a way that blind panic does not. Even if it only consists of a series of select trees and everything else is just an obstacle that has to be bashed through and not contemplated in reverence for its own sake.
The panic then, is particular.
Losing your self
When cinema tries to capture on film the lost individual’s sense of their panic the camera is swung about unfocussed and the imaged projected is blurred. Perhaps with a bit of mindless screaming on the soundtrack. But it is not like this at all. The trees do not so much look all alike, merely not different — enough. For when I was lost I could see every vein on every leaf and every twig and every branch and shrub and every tree and every rock and I had no way to find my way through the undifferentiated scrub. I could see every difference and they meant nothing, they were not even the same. There were no mosaics now. No plant communities, no pretty fractals. For I had lost myself.
And there reason why is that I had no style. No style of moving. I had no bias. I was impartial. I had no certain truth.
Before I was lost I did have a style of moving and thus I had a landscape. Misguided as it was. The style was one I had learned in the company of my childhood peers. It was one of simple reverie, of delight in the bush, of each plant or rock, in each step into a glade or grove. This embodied style, the bias and the landscape that this composed as I move through the terrain disappeared when I noticed I was not making my way back to the familiar landscape. When the landscape lost its particularity and became scrub, my childhood reverie style of moving had reached its limit of truth, the shortcomings of that bias had been found, beyond which I ceased to know my self. The ground had been taken from me. And I lost me.
The panic arose but I knew I had to find myself again. It was an instinctual process, as learning always is, but I had to think, I had to choose my path, my story and stick to it. This is composition. I had to create a new style of moving and test it in the same movement while incorporating the panic that propelled the motion, the motility and mobility into possibility, and so gave the movement energy enough to gather a momentum, with the vector my new style provided.
The vector was a line of flight from the line of flight. Back to the landscape I knew. Away from the unknown. There was no freedom there. I had no choice. Except within where I had to compose myself anew. I chose not to fight the panic but to move with it, guiding it.
Panic revisited
While this is a success story there have been scars. The next time I visited bushland, as it happened it was Mt William National Park again, I found that my composure, my confidence in the bush was not the same. The panic was now at ready and I found it more problematic to compose myself in childhood reverie with the bush. It was not an overwhelming feeling, I did not find myself threatened by my surrounds for example, but the ease with which I slip into the bush and the sense of place was now not secure. I had a new found insecurity, particularly in denser thickets, which before I had to bash my way through. It was more than being simply aware of the dangers. It was a rising sense of fight or flight, and this energy coloured my perception, the landscape I preferred was now in danger of disappearing if my panic rose up again. The same energy which I had used to give force to my motion in getting unlost was now, in a near familiar place, capable of propelling me into the undifferentiated scrub again. It could get me lost. What scared me was that this could happen within sight of the rocks of Boulder Point. Within twenty metres of view of a car. It was now I understood how the trees can all look the same and those blurred cinematic visions of being lost gain their reality of description, even as I followed an overgrown track.
I learned more from this touch of panic revisited upon me than the first process of becoming unlost and enlandscaped again. For it made me a different person.
In conversation with others I have learned that what for me is panic revisited, and the result of a fractured confidence in reverie, is common in their descriptions of being in the bush. Something I have been unable to gain insight into before. Being healthy does not let you empathise with the ill, whatever your noble sympathies. And the insecure are trying to find their way to a landscape they have never known, how will they recognise it, how can anyone understand that if they have never been there. Lost without ever knowing a landscape. Without a movement style only panic.
And this is besides the lessons of learning the limits of one’s bias, preferences and soul. The lessons of learning to create a new style of moving. The lessons that widened the variety of styles one has as well as indulging the specialty of one’s preferred way is very important.
I was shaken more by this touch of panic rising up unbidden in a safe though unfamiliar place than I was by getting lost in the first place. Because it solicited the recognition that I was not the same person anymore. I had become someone else. That childhood reverie was one step further from me.
Lessoned land
The third time I went back I was determined to met this fear of fear itself, under controlled conditions. I consciously chose not to carry a compass, however ever since getting lost that first time I had studied the map, and had studied the land from various vantage points, like the Boulder Point rocks, in trying to work out my movements that day. I was not going to go too far, no more than two brackets of unburnt scrub, but it would be more than just a short unconscious loop, but not enough so that I would end up in moving in circles away from the road. In any case there was sun and shadow today.
After the first bracket I found myself in a similar burnt landscape of savanna like mosaics of tall banksia over recovering heath like that nearer the road. Quite beautiful. Past the second westward bracket, this time not a thicket of melaleuca but some eucalypts and dense undergrowth, I came into a wide unburnt dry wetland. I turn northwards into the sun, enjoying the openness of the lie of the land.
It was time to turn back. I turned left again into the trees and found myself once off the wetland on a slope. The undergrowth was not burnt but I noticed there was a small rise to the left. Looking between the bracken I noticed there was a strong shell-scatter amongst the leaf litter. Soon I saw stone artefacts. They are always so common in unfarmed land. At the top of the rise the east coast red granite broke the surface again. I enjoyed the rough texture against my hands. These were not unfriendly rocks. I felt quite calm there was no discomfort in my movements I was feeling in reverie again. I noticed through the trees along the rise that there was an opening. Not quite a clearing, not quite a glade, but definitely not a field felled clear.
It felt safe. The surface of the rocks were quite inviting. Then I noticed that there were a number of boobyalla growing here. Boobyalla is a coastal wattle found on dunes and such like. Its a Tasmanian Palawa kani word. Indeed from the Palawa who lived here in north eastern Tasmania. The seeds can be ground and roasted and eaten, which is probably how they got here to this granite rise, a good kilometre or more from their ‘natural’ distribution. And perhaps another ten minutes walk to the sea where all the abalone and turbo shell fragments originated.
I sat down and enjoyed the place, feeling uncertain only as to the appropriateness of my movements as a possible incursion here. The landscape I carried in my movement was sure if aware of the potential of this certainty’s overdetermination.
I decided it was time to head back but as I had not completely made a circuit of the clearer area along the rise I made my way to its northernmost end. Here the height fell away a few metres and there was more earth and less rock. The shell scatter and artefacts were just as rich. As I turned back to backtrack my way out I notice some small rocks under a skeletal shrub that I failed to notice what species it was. There were three or four rocks stacked on top of one another. They are covered in lichen. I wonder about them. I look at them. I think. I decide they are noteworthy. Yes it is time to leave.
Later I email Julie Gough about the pile of stones, a friend of mine of north east Palawa descent, though she grew up in St Kilda milk bar on Acland St, and is one of the people who gets disorientated on median strips where the grass has been allowed to grow too much. (Not my words!) Julie is in London doing her Masters in fine arts or something. Just before she left, Mona and I organised her to see her home country, Bay of Fires just to the south, and Cape Portland just to the west of Mt William National Park. Julie emails back saying that stacking stones was observed both of Palawa children playing and of adults last century. They would stack the stones as they told a story. Presently I am waiting to see if I can take Greg Lehman of the Riawunna Centre at the University of Tasmania to see the stack of stones, to see if they are of any importance. I look at them now in my mind’s eye, one for loss, one for found, one for here now. That’s the only story I can see. I cannot connect them with the old stones I knew in West Cork in the early 90s, at least not yet.
Anyway, on leaving the granite raise I decided to head back in a straight line and not retrace my steps. The growth is quite thick in places and I find myself having to push my way through. Panic rose in its assured way and I began to wonder if it would always be there now, behind that thicket, in that scrub, and wonder if I would ever be ready to accept it as part of me. It was never there before. What have I learned? What have I acquired? What is it now that is released? Releasing?
I am not sure.
Crossposted whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com